MOVING PICTURES

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S THE CONVERSATION IS A MUST-HEAR FILM AT THE BELCOURT

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

When someone insists that you have to catch a movie “on the big screen” at a theater, they’re usually talking about a visual experience. And the painterly frames of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) or the stellar scenes of the latest installment of the Star Wars cinematic universe definitely translate better on a big screen in a crowded theater than on your phone on your couch.

Several years ago I went to the Belcourt to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966). I’d seen the movie on disc at home and felt like it was a charming — but dated — curio capturing London’s swinging 1960s, but not really worthy of its still-legendary reputation. That said, when the movie later screened at the Belcourt, I bought a ticket. No spoilers, but in the film’s last scene there’s a sound that creates an entirely new context for the whole film. I’d missed that sound — and dismissed the movie — at home. But, when I got the full visual and audio experience at the theater, it made all the difference.

Francis Ford Coppola’s lesser-known masterpiece The Conversation (1974) is a movie you need to hear on the big screen. The Conversation is a movie about surveillance and paranoia, trust and suspicion. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a sound recording expert who runs an eavesdropping business. In the film’s iconic opening scene (shot by the legendary Haskell Wexler before he was fired from the production), Caul and his team track a couple through San Francisco’s crowded Union Square. The pair weave around kids and elderly ladies, passing business men on lunch break, walking by mimes and street musicians. All the while Caul’s team uses a variety of gadgets and techniques to follow their titular conversation through the scene while movie’s soundtrack registers the hum, hiss, crackle and pop of hidden microphones and patch bay wires, and the wow and flutter of the reel-to-reel recorders spinning in the team’s van. Copolla seamlessly blends telescopic shots with extreme close-ups throughout the complicated blocking, but the sound editing of Walter Murch steals the opening of the film. And it’s Murch’s Academy Award-nominated audio collages that make The Conversation one of the most listenable movies ever made.

The Conversation is a psychological thriller. The thriller part comes as the meaning behind the sounds and voices that Harry and his team record are slowly revealed. But The Conversation is also a psychological portrait of Caul — a devout Catholic who lives alone in a small apartment where he lies about not having a phone line. He has no friends and his only personal connection is with a secret girlfriend (the wonderful Teri Garr) he keeps completely compartmentalized away from all the details of his life and his work. In a career packed with legendary performances, Caul is one of Hackman’s greatest roles. But Caul’s a 180 degree turn away from Hackman's legendary Popeye Doyle performance in The French Connection (1971). Doyle spit classic lines and filled the screen with aggressive physicality, but Caul lurks behind his nerdy glasses, guilt-ridden, anxious and nearly as iconic in his restraint as Doyle is in his lack of it. Hackman is also supported here by an amazing cast of Coppola movie regulars including Robert Duvall as the secretive director of the firm that hires Caul to do the recording, and Harrison

Ford as Duvall’s charmingly evil assistant. The great John Cazale gives another masterclass performance as Harry’s assistant, Stan between his turns playing Fredo Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather II.

The Conversation was inspired by Antonioni’s Blowup, and it’s the kind of small European-style movie that Coppola planned on making a career out of if not for the fact that he kept scoring blockbusters with projects like The Godfather Trilogy and Apocalypse Now (1979). The Conversation doesn’t have the epic scale of Coppola’s better-known movies, but, like Caul’s recording of the conversation, it’s practically perfect.

The Conversation screens at the Belcourt Theatre Wednesday and Thursday, March 30 and 31. Go to www.belcourt.org for times and tickets

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.